Microsoft's VP of GenAI research Sebastien Bubeck joins OpenAI

Sebastien Bubeck, Microsoft’s vice president of GenAI research, is leaving the company to join OpenAI, according to a statement from Microsoft on Monday. It remains unclear what role Bubeck will take at OpenAI, the artificial intelligence startup backed by Microsoft.

Bubeck led the Machine Learning Foundations group at Microsoft Research Redmond. He joined MSR in 2014, after three years as an assistant professor at Princeton University. He received several best paper awards at machine learning conferences for his work on online decision-making, convex optimisation, and adversarial robustness (NeurIPS 2021, NeurIPS 2018, ALT 2018, COLT 2016, COLT 2009). He also wrote two monographs, 'Regret Analysis of Stochastic and Non-Stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit Problems' (2012) and 'Convex Optimisation: Algorithms and Complexity' (2014). 

A Microsoft spokesperson reportedly confirmed Bubeck’s departure, stating that he is leaving to advance his work on developing artificial general intelligence (AGI). The company expressed optimism about maintaining their partnership through Bubeck’s future work with OpenAI. 

Despite Bubeck’s exit, most of his coauthors who contributed to a research paper on Microsoft’s Phi LLMs, a series of smaller-scale language models, will remain at the company to continue their efforts, as per reports.

This move comes amid recent high-profile departures from OpenAI, including its former Chief Technology Officer, Mira Murati.